Carter made us all fall in love
Despite heartaches, his Hall of Fame legacy is a generation of players, fans
Now that’s it’s truly over — now that he will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame — how do you remember Vince Carter?
As the young comet, streaking across the Toronto sky? As the sulking star, the returning villain, the boo magnet, the argument, or eventually, the wise old vet, tearing up at a Raptors tribute video?
He was all of those things over the years, and in the end he played the third-most NBA games in history. Only 20 players scored more points. Now, he’s going to the Hall of Fame. No small thing.
And somehow it would be easy to consider him a story about disappointment, in Toronto and elsewhere. If only he had Michael Jordan’s drive, or Kobe Bryant’s, or whomever’s. If only he had stayed. (Imagine Tracy McGrady as the No. 1, and Vince as a No. 2.) The argument over his legacy here was both exhausting and exhausted after a while, even as it tended, slowly and incompletely, toward forgiveness.
As a player, you could argue it was his longevity that got him to the Hall. Carter only made two all-NBA teams: third team in his second season, and second team in his third. He was never a serious MVP candidate, and made one more all-star game than Joe Johnson did. He reached one Eastern Conference final as a supporting player on the Orlando Magic team that lost to Boston in 2010. His three most memorable moments might have been the 2000 Olympic dunk of death, the 2001 slam dunk contest, and the missed last shot in Game 7 in Philadelphia after attending his college graduation.
Statistically, Carter peaked in his third season, and again in that first stretch in New Jersey after he forced his way out of Toronto. That was it.
And eventually he segued into a supporting role in Orlando and Dallas, and then as a wily old vet in the hinterlands: Memphis, Sacramento, Orlando, as his career grew both bigger and smaller. The Grizzlies had Allen Iverson, Carter’s rival in the great 2001 playoff duel, and Iverson couldn’t take a nonspotlight role in Memphis, played three games and was waived. Carter? He adapted easily to not being a star.
“I almost wonder if he was more comfortable that way,” says John Hollinger, the writer for The Athletic who was a Grizzlies executive when Vince was there.
The stardom truly was a frenzy, though, in a nation where some of the hockey crowd wasn’t receptive to a new sport, and that is Carter’s real basketball legacy to this day. The Raptors front office suddenly found it was easy to sell tickets. A generation of future NBA players saw their first Canada-based star. All those young fans dragged their parents to a game, and years later, took their own kids.
And even once the Raptors were back in the playoffs, in 2014 and 2015 and 2016, team president Masai Ujiri would meet people in town and they would say, remember when Vince was here? Carter didn’t save the franchise, but he made it.
“He was an A-lister with us,” says Jack Armstrong, whose first game as a Raptors broadcaster was Carter’s first game, in Boston, in 1999. “And so, for that alone, if he’s not in the Hall of Fame, first ballot, as a player, then he should be in the Hall of Fame, first ballot, as a founder. Who knows where basketball goes if he doesn’t come here?”
Carter’s departure was the welcome-to-the-NBA moment for a real franchise.
He once told me, of forcing his way out of Toronto, “It’s like your child leaving, and your kid’s growing up, and now he’s going off into the real world. For so long, I wanted to ask all these people who said they hate me, and ‘You suck,’ I wanted to ask them why? And here’s the answer: Because that’s just the sports thing to do.”
Either he never really understood, or he pretended not to. Either way, time and the 2019 title healed some of those wounds, and in the end the argument over Carter’s legacy was Carter’s legacy: It was a measure of how many people he pulled into the world of the Raptors and basketball in Canada, and how much they cared.
So when you think back you should remember all of it: You should remember the player who made a lot of Canadians fall in love with the game, or the malingerer Toronto hated, or the guy who never found a better home than here. Vince Carter was the greatest disappointment, the most consequential failure, the divorced father of modern Canadian basketball. And he’s the most important Raptor in history, still to this day.
And for all the what-ifs, he could never be anything other than Vince. And in the big picture, if you look in the right places, it’s OK to say that was enough.